BenQ W6000 DLP Projector - BenQ W6000

Summary

Our Score

The next thing that helps the W6000's pictures look so dynamic is the fact that its startling brightness levels don't prevent it from also producing a really deep black level response. So while light scenes look searingly bright, dark scenes look decently - if not class-leadingly - black.

Even better, the W6000 is very accomplished at rendering those tricky shots where you've got a mixture of very bright and very dark elements within the same frame, and its strong combination of contrast and brightness enables it to reproduce subtle shadow details more successfully than many of its peers.

The third key to the intensity of the W6000's pictures is their colour response. With the Brilliant Colour mode engaged, the W6000's saturations explode off the screen. It's a pity, then, that Brilliant Colour also regurgitates quite a few rogue colour tones. But fear not; colours still look very dynamic with Brilliant Colour off.

The final major factor in the W6000's intense HD picture is its sharpness. It can reproduce HD sources with pixel-perfect precision, right down to the celluloid grain reproduced on many Blu-rays. This helps pictures look more three-dimensional as well as, of course, ensuring that they look blisteringly crisp.

The W6000 isn't only good with HD, though. As predicted, that HQV processing makes the W6000 quite accomplished at showing standard definition too. Certainly it looks markedly sharper - without source noise being unduly emphasised - than many rivals in its price bracket, with the only negative being a tendency for some edges to look a touch over-stressed.

Make no mistake about it people: when the W6000 looks good, it really does look very good indeed. But I do have one or two issues with it too.

First of all, it's a touch susceptible to a couple of classic DLP problems. For instance, as I often find with affordable but very bright DLP projectors, even though the W6000 uses a six-segment colour wheel, there's still occasionally evidence of the rainbow effect, where red, green and blue stripes flit momentarily around your peripheral vision.

I should stress that this only happens when a shot has very bright and dark elements together, such as a credit sequence, with white letters over black backgrounds. But if you're one of those people who are particularly susceptible to seeing the rainbow effect, then it's something you need to try and check out in a demo room before committing to buying a W6000.

The W6000 also suffers a little from DLP's motion handling issues. This can find motion looking a touch blurred when it's really fast, such as during quick camera pans or football matches. In fact, while playing FIFA 10 on my Xbox 360 I even spotted traces of dithering noise (small, momentary dotty trails) behind the players whenever the virtual camera panned to track the ball following a big clearance or goal kick. I wouldn't say that this dithering is ever really noticeable with video viewing.